Events

Sunday, June 1 2014

In the pre-digital era before cellphones, satellites, and the internet allowed travelers to instantly transmit their photos and comments to family and friends, Americans relied on “snail mail” and the picture postcard.

More than 200 examples of Kansas City postcards from the early to mid-1900s are featured in an encore presentation of the exhibit Greetings from Kansas City: Postcard Views of a Midwestern Metropolis, 1900-1950. Created in 2013 and originally displayed from January through June of that year, the exhibit earned the American Library Association’s 2014 Excellence in Library Programming Award.

For more than a century, the Kansas City Stockyards fed a nation hungry for fresh meat. The heyday of the stockyards is long gone, undermined by flood, environmental concerns, and shifting economics. But this powerful financial engine is celebrated in Cowtown: History of the Kansas City Stockyards, a new exhibition of photographs, blueprints, drawings, and documents culled from more than 5,000 items retrieved from a Livestock Exchange Building storeroom in 2008.

Hixon transformed the field of portrait photography in Kansas City and the surrounding region during a career that spanned more than seven decades. His studios—the first in the Brady Building at 11th and Main Streets, and the second just one block west in the Baltimore Hotel—welcomed thousands of patrons throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

The greatest swashbuckling film of all time almost bit the dust with a mid-production change in directors. But from a potential disaster arose what the New York Times’ Frank Nugent deemed “A richly produced, bravely bedecked, romantic, and colorful show … it can be calculated to rejoice the eights, rejuvenate the eighties, and delight those in between.” The Technicolor production is spectacular with castles, pageantry, gorgeous costumes. The style is lighthearted yet mythic, crammed with both bravura heroics and comic panache.